FBI uses spyware to bust bomb threat hoaxster

The FBI helped uncover the identity of a high school student who made repeated …

A Washington state high school student has pleaded guilty to e-mailing repeated bomb threats to school in late May and early June of this year. According to a local newspaper, a court has just decided that a student named Josh will serve 90 days in juvenile detention, pay $8,852 to compensate the school for additional security, and be barred from using computers, video games, or mobile phones for two years. He has also been expelled from school. But the most interesting aspect of this case is how Josh was tracked down by the FBI, which used something called a "Computer & Internet Protocol Address Verifier" (CIPAV) that was installed on Josh's machine remotely. In other words, the FBI used spyware.

On May 30, 2007, bomb threats began arriving at Timberline High School. The first was a handwritten note, which led to the evacuation of the school. On June 4, the chilling e-mails began. "I will be blowing up your school Monday, June 4, 2007," read the first. "There are 4 bombs planted throughout timberline high school. One in the math hall, library hall, main office and one portable. The bombs will go off in 5 minute intervals at 9:15 AM."

The e-mails arrived almost daily, telling the school's principal to "ENJOY YOUR LIFE ENDING." They also taunted authorities, who were "too stupid to trace the e-mail." Students who had MySpace accounts began to receive invitations from "Timberlinebombinfo," another MySpace user purporting to be the threatener. Cops subpoenaed MySpace and the e-mail services used to make the threats, but found that all have been created from various Italian computers, apparently used to disguise the tracks.

The FBI was soon involved in the case, which by now had shut down the school half a dozen times near the very end of the semester. Special Agent Norman Sanders sought a warrant on June 12 from a federal judge that would allow the FBI to target the "Timberlinebombinfo" MySpace account with the CIPAV, though Sanders offers few details on how this would be accomplished. "The exact nature of these commands, processes, capabilities, and their configuration is classified as a law enforcement sensitive investigative technique," wrote Sanders. He did note that if the Bureau could get the CIPAV installed on the user's machine, it would be able to collect the machine's IP address, MAC address, list of running programs, operating system, Internet browser used, language used, the registered computer name, the currently logged-in username, and more. All of this information would be relayed over the Internet back to an FBI computer in Virginia.

Once this one-time scan had been done and relayed to the FBI, CIPAV would switch operations and start to function as a "pen register" that records only "the routing and destination addressing information for electronic communications originating from the activating computer." That is, it would not capture any of the content, only header information, URLs, etc., and would do so for a period of 60 days. All of this data would also be forwarded to the FBI. The judge approved the request and allowed the government to keep the warrant secret until 30 days had passed from the day it first discovered the suspect's identity.

The Feds did manage to slip CIPAV onto Josh's machine, and the information soon led to the boy's arrest. According to court records, the warrant was executed "over the Internet" at 5:49pm the day after the warrant was issued, and the result was a CD-ROM worth of data.

Josh has already served more than a third of this time in jail while awaiting his trial, which has now ended, and he claims to have learned valuable lessons from the experience.

One of the sad byproducts of the whole case is that Josh did what he could to make the high school believe that another student was behind the threats, and that student has now endured so much abuse that he has decided to change schools. At Josh's hearing, the other student's mother told the court how her son had even been spat on at school by those who thought he was responsible.

Further reading:

Those with PACER account access to the federal courts can read the warrant affidavit, which is part of case 3:07-mj-05114-JPD, USA v. MySpace account "Timberlinebombinfo," in the Western District of Washington